DT26010 Voice in Your Head V01 190326

 🔥 Who Is Really You?

If the voice in your head is you… then who is the one listening?

And if you are the listener… then who does that voice actually belong to?

Most people never stop to question it. The running commentary in the mind just gets accepted as “me.” The thoughts, the reactions, the stories… they feel personal, so we assume they are who we are.

But if you slow down for a moment, you can actually hear it. The voice is speaking… and something else is noticing it.

That changes everything.

Because the voice isn’t the whole of you. It’s the mind… built from memory, conditioning, fear, identity… constantly narrating and trying to make sense of the world.

But the one listening… that’s different.

That’s the quiet presence behind it all. The part of you that observes without needing to react. The part that was there before the thought showed up… and is still there after it passes.

So if you are the one listening… then the voice belongs to the constructed self… the personality… the learned version of you that’s been shaped over time.

And here’s where it goes even deeper…

You can actually become aware of the listener too.

And when that happens, you begin to touch something beyond both the voice and the observer… something that isn’t a role, a thought, or even an identity.

Just presence.

That’s why silence can feel uncomfortable at first… because when the voice quiets down, what you thought was “you” starts to lose its grip.

But on the other side of that…

is clarity.

is peace.

is the real you.

ZF 🔥

DT26009 Likes and Clicks mean Attention V01 170326

 Clicks, not conviction, are really driving hate

Manosphere influencers don’t always believe the extreme content they peddle but know it will win the attention wars

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James Marriott @J_AMESMARRIOTT

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James Marriott

There are some obvious differences in personal deportment, political orientation and muscle mass. But watching Louis Theroux’s parade of lunkheaded manosphere influencers — all skintight suits, neolithic theories of gender relations and sub-Del Boy schemes to get rich — I felt a whisper of recognition.

I am, I hope, a long way from Inside the Manosphere but anyone who depends for their livelihood on a public profile is familiar with the tyranny of the attention economy. Having spent the early part of my career obsessing over likes, retweets and page views, I know the insanity the preoccupation brings. Theroux’s influencers, some of whom broadcast for seven hours a day, live for the algorithm. They stand in the full roar of the hurricane of comments, likes and shares from which most of us would recoil.

Everything is measurable nowadays. And nothing is more carefully monitored than popularity. The average social media post has its vital signs tracked with hospital ward sensitivity. In 2026 mere “likes” are as old-fashioned a metric as those barometers you get in hallways of country house hotels. YouTube supplies its “content creators” with a series of space-age dashboards recording watch time, reach, average view duration and impressions.

Attention has always been desirable. It is becoming a dangerously unchallenged cultural force, displacing every other measure of value. It is, after all, so eminently quantifiable. Morality is subjective. Entertainment is subjective. Aesthetic value is subjective. But attention is hard inarguable currency (literally so for those influencers who succeed in channelling their followers on to trading platforms and gambling sites).

Nobody understands the uncompromising logic of attention better than the world’s most popular YouTuber James Donaldson, aka MrBeast, who issued a handbook to his employees advising them how to make successful videos. A 20thcentury media enterprise would have supplied its staff with chirpy instructions to entertain viewers. Donaldson is focused only on the utilitarian business of retaining eyeballs. His workers are instructed: “Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.” Rather, they are to concentrate on metrics: “Click Thru Rate (CTR), Average View Duration (AVD), and Average View Percentage (AVP)”.

I think there is a cultural change here. Once upon a time even the most grasping Z-lister would have hesitated to publicly admit their only aim was notoriety. There was a social obligation to talk, however hypocritically, about wanting to make people happy or make the world a better place. As Theroux’s main exhibit, the influencer HSTikkyTokky (his alias conveys his unembarrassable character) remarks, the sole point of his career is to acquire attention “and with the attention I get more fame” which he can “monetise”. In a recent interview Theroux commented that although influencers were generally dismissive of him, “You get credit when they see how big your social media following is”.

To many, Tate’s cigarsand-cars lifestyle make him a diverting buffoon 

Hipsters, pseudo-bohemians and lovers of indie music could once be relied on to look down on “sellouts” and grifters. Such people were obnoxious but they provided useful support for values other than popularity. Their cultural influence is waning. Preposterous “Romantasy” novels must be taken seriously because they command eyeballs on TikTok. In music, the influential “poptimism” movement insists that mass-produced pop singers must be treated with the same critical reverence as independent artists. That one-time redoubt of indie sneering, the music review website Pitchfork, recently rewrote a number of old reviews to award higher scores to commercial pop stars.

Attention does not mean popularity. For many influencers the idea isn’t even to acquire fans. Teacher friends tell me Andrew Tate isn’t taken as universally seriously by young men as anxious commentators assume. To many, Tate’s cigars-andcars lifestyle and extreme opinions make him not an object of emulation but a diverting buffoon. This is the attention economy and the point is not to be liked or admired (subjective, unmeasurable and therefore useless qualities). What matters is clicks and views, even if it requires you to transform yourself into a carnival grotesque for the amusement of 13-year-old boys.

The logic of attention is its own morality. After filming himself and some friends beating up a man, the influencer Ed Matthews comments contentedly to Theroux: “Few thousand watching.” As Theroux says, these men seem to be in “an inflationary spiral of racism and bigotry in order to get people’s attention”. For many, the idea that attention trumps every other value is merely a statement of the obvious. A “content creator” recently interviewed by the news outlet London Centric for spreading viral misinformation about migrants explained he was not driven by politics or racial animus but by the observation that far-right content is “among the most engaged on TikTok” — which brought him to the pragmatic conclusion that “hate brings views”.

Because our society struggles to articulate any vision of a good or meaningful life, the void is filled by what can be measured, which is attention. The problem is compounded by the automation of the media landscape. The minimum that could be said for the old gatekeeping class of newspaper editors and TV producers was that they were human and therefore cared about human things like entertainment, fun and education. All algorithms can measure is brute likes and views ticking up on a screen. Those whose careers are driven by algorithms end up adopting the pitiless values of the machine: the numbers are all that matter.

DT26008 Storing Data for Posterity V01 070326

 The faster digital tech developed, the more data we lost — until now

Making Science with Tom Whipple: a new podcast

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Tom Whipple

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About 38,000 years ago, in a German cave, our ancestors carved symbols in a mammoth tusk. Today, in every indentation, you can still see our shared humanity, stretching over millennia. You can also see something else. Encoded on the tusk, archaeologists argued recently, is data that those ancestors wanted to preserve. It is proto-writing.

Twenty-five years ago, while a student, I also had data to preserve. I took some digital photographs and downloaded them to my desktop.

Three years later, I transferred them to my laptop. When that died, I removed the hard drive, bought a fiddly device to read it, and moved them to my new laptop. Ten years ago, tired of the laptop relay, I moved them to a home cloud server.

Then, two years ago, the cloud company emailed me: they no longer supported the hardware. Next time I tried to access it, I couldn’t. The mammoth tusk survived glaciation, civilisational collapse, Black Death and two world wars. My photos? Done in by a software update.

It’s no great loss to posterity. What it is, though, is an illustration of what’s known as the digital dark ages — a gap in the historical record coinciding with the arrival of the computer. You see the digital dark ages in the floppy disks in landfill. In Wikipedia citations that lead to 404 errors. In the great digital cataclysms — the internet equivalent of biblical floods. Myspace? One day the profiles just disappeared.

GeoCities, that once-thriving community of amateur websites and garish gifs? Dashed by the Silicon Valley gods in an afternoon.

You see it, most ironically, in the Domesday Book. In 1986, the BBC marked the 900th anniversary by making a modern version. It conducted a new census of the nation, taking down thoughts, feelings and occupations, all recorded using a technology 11thcentury scribes would have marvelled at. A technology that was, a few years later, defunct: the LaserDisc. A few years after that, no computer could read it. The original Domesday Book persisted, unchanged, on vellum. The modern one barely lasted a generation.

These days, if we really want to store data, we use magnetic tape. It works. But it’s fragile. Every ten years we have to copy it to a new tape. There are documents in the National Archives, held under the 30-year rule, that will be copied three times before anyone can read them.

Preservation, still, requires a tenuous civilisational thread, reliant on electricity, air conditioning and librarians. We are, still, in the digital dark ages.

Last month there was a bit of light.

Computer scientists unveiled Project Silica. In a Microsoft lab in Cambridge there are blocks of glass, each like a chunky microscope slide.

Hold them up, as I did, and they shimmer — imperfections catch the light, like notches in ivory. They have been carved not with flint but lasers.

Each stores seven terabytes of data.

That’s 10,000 CDs or (roughly) 600 billion mammoth tusks. Each can last 10,000 years, without requiring civilisation (and electricity) to last.

Maybe they will become the archive standard. Maybe it will be something else. But these blocks are a sign that we are emerging from the digital dark ages. Let’s just hope that, unlike the cave people, we also leave the instructions on how to read them.